Marketing students place third in Collegiate ECHO challenge

Five students making up the “Dirty Birds” team in Traci Brady’s marketing communications class last semester won third place in the Collegiate ECHO Marketing challenge, a competition sponsored by Boxed that drew marketing campaign submissions from students worldwide.

The Salve Regina students, who represent a variety of majors and minors, included Colin Clapton, Allison Notarangelo, Brandon O’Neill, Jacqueline Chevannes and Lydia Foster. In addition to their marketing campaign placing third overall, their executive summary won an honorable mention.

The 2018-2019 Collegiate ECHO Challenge required students to develop an integrated marketing communications campaign for the company Boxed, which allows customers to shop for bulk household items online and have them shipped directly to their door with no membership fees and free delivery.

Students chose one local geographic market to use to increase traffic and sales for the Boxed brand using digital, non-digital, word of mouth and guerilla marketing tactics to acquire new customers in their target market.

Using a $250,000 budget with no more than $75,000 allocated to non-digital media, the Salve team created a campaign for the San Diego market planned for the first quarter of the 2019 calendar year.  Deliverables included an executive summary, media plan, itemized budget, ROMI analysis, rough creative pieces, strategic summary table and a visual summary.

“My students often hear that research drives strategy,” Brady said. “This team did a fantastic job linking research findings to their marketing communications strategies and tactics. They worked hard to truly understand the industry, target customer and needs of the Boxed brand.”

The team’s submission, “Life Outside the Grocery Store,” spoke to consumers about regaining the time lost while grocery shopping, and using that time to reconnect with family. “The team was careful to link campaign objectives to media choices and creative work; and did extensive research and ROMI calculations to find the most efficient use of budgeted funds to reach the marketing communications objectives,” Brady said.

Collegiate ECHO judges praised Salve students’ clear objectives and well defined goals in the team’s submission and were pleased to see that the tactics were firmly rooted in research with a focus on the customer experience/satisfaction. They were also happy to see that the team built in time to review learnings and optimize performance throughout the campaign.